1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for positioning a piece of meat in a given position onto the saddle of a trimming conveyor.
In the following description, reference will be made almost exclusively to pork loins as the kind of pieces of meat that may be positioned with the apparatus. Even though the application of the apparatus according to the invention to pork loins is certainly very interesting, the invention is not and should not be understood as being restricted to the processing of such pieces of meat exclusively.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
In the meat processing industry, it is of common practice to subdivide into various parts the carcasses of the animals that have been slaughtered. Usually, each carcass is divided into two halves, each of which contains a loin portion.
Usually also, each loin portion is separated from the outer rib portion of the half and then passed through a fat-trimming machine called "loin puller". This machine includes a conveyor for moving the half lengthwisely past a contoured knife that is shaped and positioned in such a manner as to extract the maximum amount of lean meat, and to leave the fat. An example of such loin puller is disclosed in Applicant's Canadian patent No. 2,012,356 issued on Dec. 14, 1993. It is also of common practice to further trim manually each loin leaving the loin puller, in order to remove a maximum of fat before weighting the loin and packaging the same. Such manual trimming is carried out onto a conveyor hereinafter called "trimming" or "receiving" conveyor, on which are mounted a plurality of saddles at given intervals, each saddle being shaped and sized to receive the loin upside down. A plurality of operators manually trim the fat from the exposed surfaces of the loins positioned on the saddles while the same move with the conveyor.
So far, the positioning of the loins into the saddles of the trimming conveyor has been made manually.